Wednesday, October 11, 2017

There was a (brief) pleasure in opening the pages of the irving press today. Norbert Cunningham has at last noticed that climate change is happening - and quickly. And I can agree with him that no government at any level in this province has made any plans for dealing with it. (The last brilliant idea out of our provincial government was to make it worse by building a pipeline.)

And Carmel Higgins had a very interesting column on a United Church minister, Greta Vosper, who spoke here about her book, With or Without God. (This is a minister who does not believe in God.) We need more ministers like that.

Instead, we have churches that put the emphasis on belief and, in doing so, largely ignore the thrust of Jesus' preaching about our responsibilities to each other. The result is a society of people who run about with excitement that since they believe, they will make the cut to get into heaven - and they completely ignore the importance of Christian behaviour.

The big news for the world section was that there wasn't any. (Well, there was one, small story about wildfires in California. That's kind of important because wildfires are things we can expect more of with climate warming.)

But the big news for the world in the view of the news editor was that a local man failed to sink a world record, long putt. Well, in fact, the only part worth reading is the story about the California wildfires.

The other notable development is that the Canada&World section has been cut down to 2 pages (2 sides of one piece of paper.) The other pages now serve to display puzzles and a dreadful comics page. This is not a newspaper that wants its readers to know what's going on.
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So here's a story you'll never find in the irving press - or any other commercial news medium. It's all about the creation of terrorism in the form of murdering civilians, including women and children, in war.

The story began for me about 15 years ago. The National Film Board had made a film series called Canada At War. Veteran's groups were furious about a section on the bombing of Dresden in WW2 because it said that bombing was deliberately aimed at civilian targets. It was terrorism by bombing. A senate investigation was set up, and I offered to answer its questions.

As I waited my turn to testify (it was on Nov. 11), a bomber veteran approached me almost in tears.

"My grandchildren asked me if it was really true that I had killed all those children. Do you know how that feels?"

Certainly, I could guess how it felt. But it was not his fault. He was young, caught up in a war, and he heard every day how the enemy was evil. He wasn't vicious. He had been used. What the Canadian government should have been doing for those pilots was the help them understand that they had been cruelly imstreated - by us.

The senate committee, all Conservatives, knew that I was going to support the film. So they asked very few and very harmless questions so they could get rid of me, and get back to their hatchet job on the film. So I didn't have time to explain the origins of this business of bombing civilians.

It began in 1920 with Iraq. Britain was busy creating an artificial, puppet state of Iraq so British capitalists could rip off its oil. The obstacles were the Kurds of the region who wanted their own country. The colonial minister, Winston Churchill was worried that putting down the Kurds would be expensive, requiring an army of 100,000 or so. So he worked out a better way with his local air force chief, the man who, in World War 2, would become "Bomber Harris".

They settled on terror bombing of Kurdish villages and towns. Lacking aircraft and AA guns, the villages would be easy pickings for the bombers. They would then bomb the civilians, paying special attention to the civilians who were usually the sole occupants of these villages. The theory was that the mass killing of civilians would terrorize the Kurds into surrender. To help that along, Harris included small bombs that would wait until children picked them up, perhaps years later, as playthings.)

(Churchill, despite his WW2 reputation, was both murderous and the sort of racist that all empires produce. Harris, very similar in outlook, carried out the slaughter to the satisfaction of all of the Christian capitalists of Britain's oil industry.)

The British press, of course, did NOT carry the story.

Germany noted this experiment in terrorism, and copied it in an attack on Spanish civilians in a town called Guernica. This, of course, was publicized in the western world as a sample of how evil Germans were.

With World War Two, Churchill became P.M. and Harris his Air Marshal. Both voiced the view that terrorist bombing of civilians would hasten the end of the war. The U.S. was enthusiastic. So was Canada. And so they all bombed Dresden, the first of a series of terrorist raids deliberately aimed at civilians and children.

These raids did not, in fact, hasten the end of the war. Even the ultimate terrorist raids of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not do that. But the U.S. picked up the idea of killing large numbers of innocent people for its empire building after 1945. Part of the reason was that the British and American publics did not want wars with high casualties from home. So their governments concentrated on massive bombing, particularly against weakly armed opponents. Lots of women and children got killed - but very few bomber pilots, as compared to ground troops, got killed. Thus the enthusiasm for chemical bombs (agent orange and napalm), cluster bombs.....

The result was the Korean War with far the highest proportion of civilian deaths in history. The total death toll was 33% of the WHOLE population. In world war two, the more common proportion, civilians and military, was 1% or so.

Similar attacks were carried out in Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, and the terrorist air attack became standard practice in western countries. That's why, when Canada bombed Libya, not a single pilot was lost.

So where do Muslims come in? In the 1970s, Russia was attacking Afghanistan. So the CIA sent agents there to teach the Afghanis the methods of terrorism.

Yep. Muslims learned all about terrorism from our side. And I'll betcha never see that story in the irving press.
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Yes. Our climate is changing. And very, very rapidly. So, gee, it might not be a really good idea to build more oil pipelines. Will the oil industry understand that?

Will it be the subject of the sermon at the Irving Chapel this Sunday?
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Watch for both Russia and China to get more aggressive with the U.S. in the coming weeks. Though most of our press hasn't noticed it, the U.S. empire is in terminal decline. And it's not just because of Trump. U.S. business has been running wild all over the world since 1945, caught up in the delusion that it would now conquer the world.

Reality should have settled in with the U.S. aggressions of Bush to the present which made a mess of the middle east, and turned much of world opinion away from the U.S. Watch for that world opinion to continue to drift from the U.S.

The great threats to this world are not nations. They are the super-rich of all countries. Commonly, they do not pay taxes - and, if they do, they are severely reduced ones. They are accumulating all of the world's wealth in their own pockets. They own governments. They are greedy, indifferent to the needs of others, and very, very short-sighted.

They kill people by the millions for what they want - as in Vietnam, Korea, the middle east, Guatemala........ And their wars are paid for by the rest of us.

It must have been seven or eight years ago that the leading irving wrote a column in his papers. He was going to plan the New Brunswick economy. He had no qualifications to do any such thing. And, since nobody had elected him, he had no right to do it. But as soon as he announced his plan, the province's university presidents dropped to the ass-kissing position, and vowed to help him.

That's one of the problems of privately-owned universities. Student fees, high as they are, cannot be high enough. The schools have to raise money, and that means they have to scrape and bow before the very wealthy who sit on their boards. And some professors, not many but some, openly become shills for the wealthy.

Many countries, even poor ones, get around that by supporting the universities financially. This means a tremendous saving for students; it means the universities can offer equal opportunities to all; and it means less interference of the wealthy in the affairs of the universities. (And maybe, just maybe, it would encourage the universities to learn how to teach.)

But Canada and the U.S. have not caught on to that. Neither seems to realize that equality of people begins with equality of opportunity. The one person who has caught on is Senator Bernie Sanders of the U.S.

New Brunswick has a 'culture of compliance'. By that, I mean its people are reluctant to think for themselves. They avoid serious political discussion, fearful of not thinking the same as everyone else. But there's a price for having a 'culture of compliance'.

News has been lacking on one story that is really quite important. World War Two brought many opportunities to the U.S. In fact, those opportunities are why it joined the war. Among them was the opportunity to take over the British Empire.

It didn't entirely work. The U.S. didn't get China. But it did get much of the middle east and its oil. (Thus the American determination to this day to get control of Iran.)

Britain became a puppet of what had once been its colony. Thus its participation in American wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of Europe had to follow suit, as did Canada. But the spell has been broken.

The U.S. was not up to maintaining a world empire. And its decline began a long time ago - notably in its failures to conquer North Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the complete mess it made of dealing with the Muslim world - not to mention its own, massive corruption.

Trump did not create the downfall of American power. Trump is simply a product of a process already shaping in the years of Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Bush, Obama.... Now it can still destroy; but it is not likely it can conquer. On the contrary, we seem to be watching the ungluing of the American empire in Europe and in the middle east.
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I shall be away for a few days, and will miss the Oct. 13 blog - which may be just as well since that's a Friday 13. I should be back on Oct. 16.
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Monday, October 9, 2017

The first story is one that should come as no surprise. Big business behaved in the same way - and worse - during the great depression of the 1930s. As markets soured, the wealthy gave themselves monster bonuses while cutting staff, brutally cutting pay, ending holidays, and generally abusing workers.

Today, in the Sears and Liberal government version of the dirty thirties, the government has been busily stealing the little bit of money that workers got from a failing Sears while senior executives were getting bonuses of five million or more. And the execs can always hide their millions from taxation by banking them overseas.

The big player in making it possible for millionaires to hide their money from taxation was Canada's sleaziest prime minister, Brian Mulroney who, when caught in other cheating and corruption, got a free ticket to walk off with hundreds of thousands of dollars he had illegally accepted. That's why he lives today in a monstrous mansion in Montreal's most expensive district. It was, of course, another Conservative government that let him off the hook for that.

As for the next story, the Liberal government is the one that has shown it doesn't give a damn. It has made no attempt to deal with tax havens, leaving the very wealthy free to steal what should be our money. And, in this case, it has shown indifference to human suffering.

Madagascar is the poorest country in the world with the average person living on $1.90 a day. So it is no coincidence that its people also live with the highest rate of bubonic plague in the world. (This is the horror that Europeans called the Black Death.)

Madagascar is also a very capitalist country. So it's strange because, as we all know from reading the irving press and its columnists that capitalism is just wonderful for spreading prosperity to all. (Just read Norbert Cunningham's column or economics professor de Savoie who is much admired by the irving press.)

And does Canadian business have anything to with all this? You bet it does. And why not? It happily rips off Canadians, so why shouldn't it do the same to the people of Madagascar - and South America and Asia.......?

What started me in this vein was reading the awful bilge that appears in the irving press every Saturday in the form of a sermonette by some local clergyman. These are usually wimpy little columns that have nothing to say. Why are the churches so silent on the issues that face us?

Oh, yes, they will protest against abortion. But they don't even whimper when the U.S. conducts wars that are aimed primarily at murdering civilians, including at least hundreds of thousands of babies. The U.S. is now deliberately starving huge numbers of Yemeni, mostly civilians and a large number of them babies. That has been a standard method of war since it was pioneered by Winston Churchill in 1920. The U.S. followed that lead with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those cities were chosen BECAUSE they were almost entirely civilian. The same was true of the intense bombing of North Korea in the Korean war when the civilian dead far outnumbered the military dead.

And I'm sure there were prayer services when New York was hit by the Muslim terrorist attack or 9/11. But where were the prayers during a century of western murder and pillage of Muslims when Christian business leaders were plundering ( and murdering) to steal the oil of Muslim countries?

We have far out-terrorized the Muslim terrorists. Perhaps the silliest part is that we then send missionaries to convert the people of Africa and South America that we have, for a century, been murdering and plundering. If we really want to make this a Christian world, shouldn't we be sending missionaries to convert our business leaders to Christianity?

It may well be that we go to church primarily to be accepted and socially respectable. So it is that the strongest supporters of Donald Trump are the church-goers of the so-called Bible belt. They are the lustiest supporters of "obliterating" the men, women and children of North Korea. They are the ones most eager for war against Iran so that oil billionaires can take it over again to set a dictator who will allow them to loot that country.

The Maritime provinces, incidentally, are Canada's equivalent of a Bible belt.

Jesus loved the poor. Many of our clergy and our church-goers love the rich a lot more. That's why one can always get a pricey rent-a-preacher (complete with special music) for the irving chapel, and then have a guaranteed uncontroversial sermon with guaranteed uncontroversial coffee and socializing in the barn.

The desire to be accepted (and, therefore, very, very conventional) seems strong in the maritme provinces. That's why New Brunswickers may very well vote out the Liberals for spraying our forests (and our wildlfe and us) with poison, and then vote in the Conservatives - who will do exactly the same thing.

Conform. Conform. Conform.Don't be different. By all means go to church where you just have to obey, not think. We have been murdering and plundering all over the world from centuries. The Middle East is a chaos precisely because we have been murdering and plundering for so long.

And, with rare exceptions, the Christian churches have ignored that. We poison our forests, sell them at clearance prices to a billonaire, and fire our chief medical officer for doing her job - and few even whimper.

The Blackville Village Council has agreed to hear a presentation on behalf of Stop Spraying NB Inc ( SSNB Inc.) on Oct 12 @ 6.30 pm

The Glyphosate Season is upon us – raining poison, that the World Health Organization (WHO) has called a “probable human carcinogen” on our forests, streams, rivers, wildlife and people.

This is done to kill hardwoods and create the forest of softwood trees that the market wants. Instead of poisoning our forests, we could, as Quebec has done, create hundreds of jobs in thinning operations .

Under Brian Gallant, our taxpayer dollars pay for this travesty. $10 million between 2013 and 2016 was spent on forest spraying on Public Land – dollars that result in the death of deer, moose birds and other wildlife that depend on the vegetation that glyphosate kills for food and shelter.

Blackville Village Council Office

12 South Bartholemew Rd

Thurs. Oct 12 @ 6.30 pm

Of our political parties, only one was founded on Christian principles. That was the CCF; and clergy were prominent in the party as long as it existed. But, not surprisingly, the party could not get enough financing to have much impact. So, in the late 1960s, it had to look to the unions for financial support. But the unions didn't much like Chistian principles, so they insisted the CCF drop most of them, and become the NDP.

It was Christian principles that had led to the creation of medicare for Canada. The existence of a CCF party committed to Christian principles led to other improvements in Canadian life, too. But principles didn't count much in drawing in money. So the NDP remained a party of honesty, perhaps, but no longer a party of justice for people of all levels in our society.

The Greens, too, shied away from any real confrontation with the billionaires who were destroying our environment.

The Liberals and Conservatives have, of course, continued as the servants of the rich that they always were. That's why, all this time after the Lac Megantic disaster which killed almost as many people as the recent Las Vegas massacre, no high level capitalists have been charged despite evidence they should have been.

I'm not sure where to turn from here. It's obvious the NDP has to go back to its founding, Christian principles which, luckily, are very similar to the principles of most religions.

The Greens have to combine with the NDP. The two parties cannot afford to weaken themselves by not uniting. And there is not the slightest hope of getting any change by voting Liberal or Conservative. Those two parties have served only the wealthy since they first appeared.

Then the CCF and the Greens have to address maritime audiences. That won't be easy in a province in which people are afraid to have an opinion. But it has to be done because there is not the slightest chance of any serious treatment of either of those parties by the irving press.

To make it even more difficult, the most convenient sites for such audiences are the Christian churches which have, so far, been part of the problem, and not of the solutions. (I am reminded of my speaking days in Montreal when, if I was speaking to a Jewish audience, I knew I had better have something substantial to say. But if I were speaking to Christian audience, I knew I had better have a few jokes in there.)

All of this will be difficult. But the alternative is a world made terminally destructive by the greed, brutality, and poor judgement of big business.

And we shall all live as do the people in Madagascar.
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Truth dig is a site I have neglected, perhaps frightened off by its stark view of the world situation. But I have to admit it makes sense. And it has a superb analyst in Chris Hedges who has a strong history as a journalist, scholar, linguist - and independent thinker.

His view of the future is a grim one - but realistic, honest, and well-informed one. I would add only one point to it. He writes of the rise of the billionaire class to be above governments, in effect creating their own world governments through such organizations as Bilderberg ( in which a former premier of New Brunswick has been a participant - his name is Frank McKenna. As a mere millionaire he would only be a gofer at the conference.)

But he does miss one point. Billionaires who aspire to world rule are certainly an arrogant and greedy lot. But like all the aristocracies by inheritance in world history, they become decreasingly intelligent as the years go by. They are certainly arrogant and amoral but also, generation by generation, more stupid.

Ultimately, such aristocracies, throughout history, have destroyed themselves as well as the people they ruled.

The American use of torture in Afghanistan is a story that disappeared from the news pages very quickly. We never heard much about it after it was revealed to have happened. We certainly didn't learn that the U.S. had been using torture for a century and more. We didn't learned that it almost certainly is still using torture. And we didn't learn that many, many countries throughout history have used torture - and Canada has been complicit.

Despite a rash of national apologies and, now, a large payment to families whose children were forced into residential schools, Canada is still nowhere close to dealing with its destruction of native societies. Nor will I pretend to have a solution. We cannot simply slap patches onto societies we have destroyed.

This guy could become a star, faith page commentator for the irving press.
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Despite the numbers, American military power is seriously on the decline. It is, for example, by no means certain that the U.S. could militarily defeat North Vietnam. Any such attempt would almost certainly provoke reaction from China and Russia. And the U.S. conventional military could not beat that reaction.

Nor would nuclear weapons help since all sides have enough of them to destroy the whole world many times over. (As well, the U.S. public is in no mood for a major war of any sort. That was the lesson of the Vietnam War. And that's why over half of the American army is now made up of 'mercenaries' (hired thugs and killers.) For all the talk of 'heroes' who fight for 'their country', the number of Americans willing to do so has sharply declined. Thus the reliance on mercenaries.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47962.htm

Alas, the other side is also dominated by billionaires intellectually very similar to our own.
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One of the obstacles to dealing with climate change is that the people who own major corporations that threaten our lives also own most of the news media we rely on to tell us what's happening. And they can even own some (not many, but some) of the scientific scholars in our universities.

I include the next item simply as a matter of interest. I don't think the U.S. problem is Donald Trump. No. The problem is a collapsing empire and a collapsing society - that produced a Trump. The problem is a society in which greed was allowed to run wild in the form of a capitalism with no morals, and little intelligence.

We have to think very seriously about how we treat our environment - and about how we are going to feed a growing population. Instead, the deeper thought for some of our world leaders has been either bigger profits or enforced starvation as the U.S. is doing in Yemen. Much of the real power to decide the above is in the hands of the major agricultural capitalists who share a common amorality and lack of intelligence with their other, capitalist brethren.

(And they may explain why the irving press never told us what the Bilderberg group is about.)

In fairness, these people are not capitalists. Capitalists are people who take risks with their money. But these are a more recent breed. The resemble capitalists in that they put money up. This new breed uses its clout to buy politicians - notably Liberal, Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. So they have no need to risk their money.

They simply pay off politicians to give them tax payer's money if their investments don't go well - as happened when American banks brought the world close to economic ruin as a result of their illegal operation of those banks. But they paid off the American politicians who promptly restored their fortunes using tax-payer's money. And the executives who had brought the world so class to disaster took billions of dollars personally as reward s for their incompetent and illegal behaviour.

The same is true in Canada. Small business owners are getting hit with heavy taxes - but for the biggies, it's roses, roses all the way with tax write-offs, tax havens, outright gifts and sweetheart contracts.

American and Canadian ordinary citizens are getting hit hard by the cost of all this; but they aren't getting the news reporting they need to understand it. And a result of that is that Americans have just voted for a president who is a disaster. They did it because, being ignorant of why they are suffering, large numbers voted out of anger. It was a vote against rather than a vote for. And, to that degree, it was very similar to the rise of Hitler.

The Greens and the NDP need to give more thought to the threat we are facing, and to how we must deal with it.

And our churches need less thinking about what we should pack for heaven, and more thinking about how we could live more Christian lives. (And other religions, too, might find that useful.)
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In another newspaper, I would have found the wording of this report objectionable since it implies that Jews are greedy. (I have, most of my life, had a great number of Jewish friends. And I have not found them to be greedy. Some - yes. But the some were also common in Christian society.) However, in this case the story is in a Jewish newspaper, so I guess we can accept it - and deal with the real topic it discusses.)

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.816303

Donald Trump has been refusing adequate help to Puerto Rico - though it is American territory, and is suffering dreadfully from it's recent hurricane. The reality is that Puerto Rico needs more than reconstruction. It has been a region held down in poverty by American capitalists. One of them owns over a billion dollars of the debt that has been thrust on Puerto Rico. There is no way Puerto Rico can recover from the hurricane no matter how much is spent on the cleanup. It needs that impossible debt to be forgiven.

But the only people who can be forgiven debts and given monster financial gifts are billionaires.
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That last one touches on the fundamental problem facing the world. It is not the collapse of the American empire. (Empires come and go, and damn few miss them.)

It is not the rise of China or Russia. (Both are more similar to the U.S. than either they or the U.S. would admit.)

No. The fundamental problem is the rise of an aristocracy of wealth. It is, like the older aristocracies largely due to inheritance rather than ability. (The Rockefellers dynasty, for example, goes way back well over a century.)

Like the old aristocracies, they see their wealth and power as rights rather than as responsibilities. Indeed, they see themselves as superior to other humans, perhaps almost divinely so. inevitably, they become, like the old British aristocracy, unspeakably arrogant, contemptuous of others, and, over the generations, not very bright. This has been well characterized in the amusing novels and short stories about Bertie Wooster and his servant Jeeves, by P.G.Wodehouse.

These people, with their money, have subverted democracy to buy control of our traditional political parties. Through organization like the Bilderberg Group, they plan to subvert governments all over the world - quite unnoticed by most of our news media, even when a former politician like Frank McKenna becomes prominent in it.

Generally, these are not bright people, and they have no respect for the needs of any people but themselves. Such people played major roles (THE major roles) in both World Wars - and on both sides. They played key roles in the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. And they very much want a war on Iran. They have no nationality, only greed.

For the NDP and the Greens, these are the people you have to deal with. And I don't think the platform of either party is up to what is needed.

What is needed is to get serious about informing people of what we face. It's also important to avoid violence since the only ones who have ever benefited from violence over the last century and more have been the super wealthy.

(Remember when native peoples protested against the oil industry not far from Moncton? There was some violence as the situation developed. But the first side to send in guns and the threat of violence was our 'government of the people.' Some government of the people that was!)

There is an immediate need to get out and talk to people. It won't be easy in this population that is afraid to have an opinion. But that fear is the first barrier that has to be broken.

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A final thought.

Lots and lots of people say that Trump is crazy, immature, self-loving, mentally ill, arrogant, contemptuous of most people, and stupid.

Friday, October 6, 2017

On Thursday, our local papers went wild with indignation when it was officially revealed that a company called Atcon some years ago had hit the government (and the taxpayers) for 60 million dollars. Much of it was wasted and it was, in any case, obviously an extremely bad investment as all that money was lost.

Well, New Brunswick governments have a long history of gifts to the wealthy. But most of them don't get mentioned in the irving press. Here's one of them. And it makes Atcon look like a piker.

Friday's headline is about the cancellation of Energy East, a project to pump oil through a line to the Irving refineries in New Brunswick. Well, it's not so much a news story as it is a eulogy for the poor workers who now won't get temporary jobs building the pipeline. (Yes, yes. providing jobs for ordinary people is the greatest concern of our wealthy. And these references in the paper are dominated by a phony concern for the workers who, in fact, would never see more than a tiny part of any spending that would have been be done.)

The whole story seems to have been written to comfort those few, very wealthy who wanted only to create jobs for workers. Yes. (Maybe they should pay taxes. Then we would have the money to create jobs.)

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Surprise! Norbert Cunningham had a column on the editorial page in which he warned that the U.S. is a failing state. He concludes "Failing states are bad news. It's time Canadians begin vigorously looking elsewhere, for their own good."

His opening and his closing sentences are, I think, quite correct. It's in the middle that he loses his grip of the topic when he blames it all on government encouragement of violence and the high rates of gun violence in the U.S. But, I'm afraid, it's very much worse than that.

Gun violence, bitterness, racial hatreds, dissatisfaction are the results of a failed state - not the cause of it. Americans are angry because.....well, because they know they're angry and they suspect they're abused by the leaders. They're disillusioned. But, having been raised on a mythology of what Americans are supposed to believe in, most cannot imagine any alternative to what they have - a government that is hopelessly corrupt, private business leaders who are criminally corrupt but rarely face courts. They have a sense of anger and frustration - which the Trumps of this world have exploited by encouraging Americans to see the problem in foreign people who are 'evil'.

U.S. presidents almost from the start, have played on fears and hatreds to justify wars and massive conquests. They are very much like other failed imperial powers such as Britain, France, Spain. Most of their people gained nothing from their conquests. But they were kept quiet by propaganda about how evil and backward were the people that the wealthy sent them to war against - to make huge profits for the already wealthy.

Briefly, the U.S. state is collapsing largely because the American people are not benefitting from it as they should. In brief, they are, like the British and French and the other imperial powers, paying for the wars, but not benefitting from them. The empire, as it always does, benefits only the very wealthy. But few people understand that. All most know is that they are angry as hell about....something....

In short, the U.S. is a failing state because it is a typical product of greed - this time in the form of the uncontrolled capitalist state. And so it is that a Donald Trump can live in imperial splendour while millions have to endure filth and hunger - and many, many more millions can't afford the basic medical care to stay alive.

The kind of person who rises to power in this is not commonly the one who has a solution. Instead, we more commonly get a Hitler who channels their frustrations into racial hatreds. And in Germany, as in the U.S., religious leaders commonly bought into this. Thus the enthusiasm for Trump in the Bible belt.

The answer, most likely, would be to make the corporations serve the nation. But the U.S. (and Canada) are going in the other direction.

Since 1945, the first priority of the U.S. has not been the happiness of its people. It has been an obsessive drive for the ultimate empire - the whole world - all at the feet of the leading corporations. But it can't be done.

The European nations are already looking for alternatives to a U.S. dominated world. Canada isn't. But it should be because there is every possibility that Canada will soon be an American target instead of being just an American stooge.

Climate change is already having a serious impact on American regions. Serious water problems have been felt in Texas, Arizona, California...forest fires have become a major threat to Oregon and north California as they are to BC. The midwest heartland of American agriculture has almost exhausted its groundwater resources. The obvious solution for American corporations will be to look north to Canada, a land that seems to offer a brighter future as the climate warms. And which has lots of fresh water. And they will demand that Canada become a part of the U.S.

American corporations wouldn't do that to us Canadians? Get real. Look at what they happily do to Americans.

Yes. It would be very wise for Canadians to look at taking back control of our country before it's too late.
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As things have been, they will NOT remain. Since its invasion of Iraq, American influence in the Middle East has been sinking.

Canadians have not been impressive in protecting indigenous people anywhere in the world, including in Canada. When Guatemala's people protested the environmental damage caused by mining companies (American and Canadian) to their land, Canada happily cooperated in the murder of 200,000 of them.
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Justin Trudeau is one of the least active prime ministers Canada has had.

http://rabble.ca/news/2017/10/environment-commissioner-tells-trudeau-get-cracking-climate-change
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The only American politician who seems to be taking on Trump - and offering a better future - is Bernie Sanders. I guess that's why most of the news media don't pay much attention to him.

UNZ Review is a site I choose with caution. While much of its material is good, I detect a streak of anti-semitism in its treatment of Israel. I have no doubt that the current government of Israel has many faults. But I find that it is ONLY faults that get mentioned in this review. However, the current issue has a column that has nothing to do with Israel. But it raises some interesting points about billionaires, and how they get rich.

One striking thing, though not mentioned in this article, is that our very wealthy are not a particularly well-educated lot. That is surprising since most have every educational advantage imaginable - from pampered private schooling to ease of entry to any university. But relatively few of them get far into advanced studies. (In fact, offhand, I can't think of one.) I can think of two at Acadia university who didn't even complete their bachelor's degrees.

The myth is that the wealthy should run governments because they "know how to operate a business." But a society is not a business. The result is we have massive influence in our government from people who seem not, as a group, to be above average in intelligence.

http://www.unz.com/jpetras/how-billionaires-become-billionaires/

The writer of the above missed one, important point. A very high proportion of billionaires (like Trump) were born that way.
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The U.S. governments have hated Iran for generations. Why? Because, after World War Two and years of looting by Britain, Iran wanted to control its own oil. To prevent that, the U.S. and Britain attacked Iran, and set up a dictatorship. But the Iranians resisted, and took back their own country. The U.S. and British oil industries have never forgiven Iran for that.

Now, Trump wants to get hostile because, he says, Iran is breaking an agreement not to develop nuclear weapons. He has no evidence for this. And almost all of the European Union agree that Iran has NOT developed nuclear weapons. But Trump, like his predecessors wants a war. And he's going to be looking for patsies to die for U.S. oil billionaires.

Watch Trudeau closely on this one. We could be in repeat of the days when Canadians died in Afghanistan 'for their country'.

Here's another report on what should be a huge story about Russia and the Middle East. The U.S. has made a hopeless mess of the middle east. Watch for its European allies to seek to detach themselves from the U.S. lead.
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And here's a light but interesting piece from Haaretz about two world leaders whose behaviour and beliefs might shock you. One is Nethanyahu of Israel. The other is Winston Churchill.

As Nov. 11 approaches, we should reflect on WHY Canadians served - and why so many died. They were promised - we were promised - a very different kind of world after the war. There would be an end to empires. The UN would become a sort of world government. Any aggression would be dealt with immediately.

And we have broken every promise we made. Instead, we allowed big money to rule the world. And we have put our lives and our children's lives at the service of big money.

And now after more than seventy wars since 1945, after an economy devoted entirely to serving the wealthy either through wars or through denying basic needs to its citizens, the U.S. is a failing state.

Duh. I know. In the next New Brunswick election, I'll vote for the Conservatives. And in the Canadian one, I'll vote for the Conservatives, too. Then everything will be okay.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

In general, the history of the last seventy years or so is that the U.S. government, pushed by its business leaders, wants to conquer the world. The purpose is to conquer the world - for the benefit of those business leaders. There's really nothing new about it. This has been the history of the world for thousands of years.

The history of the last two thousand years has been one of murdering and enslaving native peoples all over the world, then sending Christian missionaries - not to the savage and murderous Christian business leaders, but to their victims!!!???

That's why western 'explorers' slaughtered the native peoples of the Americas, to give western capitalists control of all that land and resources. That's why they enslaved the natives of Africa then, in even more brutal acts, slaughtered millions of Africans to steal their resources with a ferocity and greed that is still evident. That's why the British and French and Portuguese and Spanish and Americans murdered people with guns and hunger all over the world. That's what world wars one and two were really about.

That's why the Russians and Chinese were evil, we were told, because they were communists. But now that they're capitalist, they're still evil. Why? Because evil was never what it was about. It's all been about the greed of our major, business leaders, with the Canadian business leaders alongside the American ones for the ride as they were once along with the British Empire business leaders.

(Eventually, it is likely the Canadian business leaders will learn that they are disposable. Alas, it is quite possible that all Canadians will experience that.)

The terrible price for all this greed was paid for by the conquered people - and by the ordinary people of the conquering lands who suffered the most on our side, and who got the least out of it as the wealthy gorged themselves on stolen lands and mines and other resources. Thus the current Trumpian urge to invade Venezuela. And, not surprisingly, his support comes heavily from the American Bible belt. And his cabinet basks in prayers to God as it plans its next brutality.

(Here, I should make my views clear. I have no interest whatever in beliefs in heaven or hell or salvation or miracles. I'll let you know if that changes after I die. The core of the message of Jesus, a core to be found in most religions, is about our behaviour here on earth. On that basis, the record of Christians over the last 2000 years has not been impressive.)

Though I'm sure they say prayers before board meetings, there is nothing Christian about our major business leaders. Quite the opposite, they thrive on greed, indifference to human need, and that old companion of power and privilege - a sense of sneering, social superiority.

Can U.S. business leaders conquer the world? Probably not. All of its wars have been against nations smaller, poorer, and weaker than the U.S. And its record since 1945 has not been impressive. Nor is that surprising for the American people themselves showed in the Vietnam war that they were not interested in long, grinding wars. And that is why, to this day, the U.S. army depends heavily on hired mercenaries, a high proportion of them foreigners.

Since 1945, the U.S. has been far the most aggressive nation in the world. But its record is weak. Its economic foundations are deeply sunk in corruption. Its dollar has a shaky future. And it cannot possibly conquer the world without loosing nuclear destruction that would destroy the world.

One conclusion to draw from all this is that our "superior" class of big money is not very bright. It thinks in the short term. It thinks only of itself. And this is the class that owns most of our politicians.

But don't worry. Just get sprinkled with holy water, and you'll get in front of the line to heaven.
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Trump is, of course, a moron. What he has is a sense of popular resentments, and playing on those. But, in any case, moron presidents are not unusual. Nor are murderous presidents, or sell-outs to big business. In those categories one could easily place men like Trump, Truman, George Bush junior, Bill Clinton....

In any case, looney-tune presidents is what you can expect to get in a nation whose only news is propaganda, most of it put out by the same very wealthy people who own the politicians. So we live in an invented world in which anybody on our side is 'good'; anybody on the other side is 'evil'; Syrians, for example, use evil, chemical weapons. Yes. But Americans never do. Oh, no!

Most commercial news is designed to generate hatreds and fears - and myths about our innocence and goodness.

Netflix has a documentary about the rise of Adolf Hitler that is eerily reminiscent of the rise of Trump.

The next item is about schooling in Britain. But it's equally true of schooling in most countries. Our children do NOT have equal opportunities. That's why many of our political leaders are NOT particularly intelligent and, more markedly, why so many of our very wealthy are not intelligent at all.

The social class that a child is born into is a powerful influence - powerful in the standards it encourages (or doesn't encourage), in the expectancies it creates. We have a marked tendency to encourage the rich and to discourage the poor. The result is that we often produce rich morons produced by private schools who go on to become leaders, and poor but intelligent children who go on to lives of menial work.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/02/meritocracy-myth-reforming-education-uk-schools
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And here's a story about those awful Puerto Ricans who are bad-mouthing Donald Trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/03/hurricane-maria-dominica-recovery
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Here's one of many stories that wasn't important enough to make the irving press.

The next one will make me enemies. But it's one that our press will never talk about. The behaviour of Israel toward Palestinians has been shameful. It is being done with massive support by the U.S. and, frankly, it closely resembles Hitler's treatment of Jews. Indeed, like Hitler's racism, it is based on racist views of both Jews and Palestinians.

A so-called 'Israeli lobby' exists in Europe, the U.S., Canada to exploit our feelings of guilt over Hitler's holocaust to justify hatred and murder of Palestinians (who had nothing to do with the holocaust or with anti-semitism. That was entirely the work of Christians all over the western world.) In my later days on radio and in public speaking, I saw the growing influence of the Israeli lobby in the news we were being permitted to hear. That lobby has done much to destroy the Jewish community that I knew.)

For almost seventy years, the small and relatively poor nation of North Korea has suffered daily provocations by U.S. forces, and has been crushed under trade sanctions that keep it poor. It also faces the constant threat, repeated recently by the U.S. president, to nuke the country with some of the U.S.'s 7,000 nuclear missiles.

The North American press routinely portrays leader Kim Jong-un as disgusting and even comic. And he's dangerous for developing a nuclear bomb. (But the U.S. isn't dangerous for having 7,000 of the things). Kim Jung is certainly a dictator. (But the U.S. isn't all that red hot as a democracy.)

But what would you do if the U.S. had been threatening your country every day for seventy years? That's a question never asked by our propaganda press.
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Ken Burns' film about the Vietnam war has been widely praised. I thought it had good points - but was way off base in excusing it as a case of good Americanism that got lost. In fact it was a war of extraordinary and deliberate brutality that was fought to extend the American empire for American billionaires.

Trump's threats to nuke North Korea, if acted on, could, very likely, lead to a world nuclear war. It's worth thinking twice about this one.

http://rabble.ca/news/2017/10/reckless-provocation%E2%80%99-diplomacy-only-rational-solution-north-korea-says-historian-luc
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One of the critical issues our society has to deal with - and soon - is the way we have allowed the very wealthy to hide trillions of dollars from taxation. Trudeau's attack on small business as the villains is absurd. But Trudeau knows who his masters are.

But small business owners are still suckers enough to support the chamber of commerce and to clap hands for the billionaires who are ripping them off.
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https://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/10/02/analysis/how-reporters-historic-canadian-journalism-collaboration-cornered-silent-killer
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Remember about a decade ago when illegal practices put the big banks in the U.S. in danger of collapse? The executives should have gone to jail. But they didn't. No. Congress spent a vast fortune of borrowed money so those criminals could stay in power, and even get multi-millionaire dollar bonuses for what they did.

The news from the far east is always scanty. Then there's the problem that the news we do get isn't what it seems to be. There is some evidence that a we are being propagandized into a war which is not what it may seem to be about.

Fans of Agatha Christie's novels will be familiar with one of her crime solvers, Miss Marple. She lived in a remote, English village, and could solve crimes with ease. She could do so, she explained, because in a village one gets to know people well, and all people, even criminals, behave in much the same way and for very much the same reasons. The same is true with ruling classes.

The earliest aristocrats of England rose to power by their military ability. Accordingly, they saw themselves as superior to others, and thus born to rule. The same was true of kings and queens.

They assumed that their children, especially their eldest sons, would inherit their skills of leadership. Alas! That frequently proved wrong as the second, third, and later generations often displayed, at best, ordinary talent or even drooling idiocy.
Nonetheless, these generations continued to rule, to lead armies even as they dithered into incompetence. Thus the rise of an officer named Baden-Powell who became a hero to the people for his defence of Mafeking in South Africa.

In fact, he was not a hero to his superior commanders. He wasn't supposed to be defending Mafeking in the first place - but it was too late. He was a popular hero, and had to be promoted and also made a lord. Similarly, there was the uncaring aristocrat who led his troops into : "The Charge of the Light Brigade". It was an absurd attack into cannon fire that slaughtered his troops. The officer simply left them dying on the field while he returned to his yacht for supper. And there was General Gordon whose whole command was killed when he decided to defend a city that he had been ordered to evacuate. The Supreme British commander of World War 1 spent his post-war years erasing his war diaries because they revealed so many decisions that proved to be terrible.

The British kings? It becomes hard to find an even passably intelligent one in the last 500 years or so. The House of Windsor has been lucky with Elizabeth who at least knows when to keep her head down. More commonly, it has been a family of remarkably low intelligence.

And so it has been throughout history. The emperors and aristocrats of early Rome became the frivolous spendthrifts who destroyed the Roman people and the empire by their own self-serving greed.

The billionaires by inheritance with their very expensive schools and their social pretensions and sense of privilege are the Baden-Powells and Gordons and Edward VIIIs of our time. And, like their predecessors, they are doing enormous damage.

Monday, October 2, 2017

Oh, that means Muslim terrorists will never catch up to the rate at which Americans kill each other. 9/11 was the ultimate Muslim terrorist attack, killing some 3,000 Americans. But in just over two years, the U.S. police put that attack in the shade by killing more Americans than the terrorists did. And they continue their frantic pace of killing to this day.

The U.S. now puts enormous public effort into hunting down Muslim terrorists, but virtually none into hunting down American police terrorists. There's something wrong with this picture.

The good news is that the New Brunswick premier says that the Energy East Pipeline deal is in real trouble - mostly due to market conditions - and will probably not go through. Gee. That's too bad. Now we won't have oil coming across the country to pollute the air at our refinery city, and we won't be able to encourage climate warming by putting more oil into foreign markets. (Shouldn't we be passing around the hat to help out the Irving family?)

Also good news is the story that New Brunswick continues to be a leader in illiteracy with half its population, at least, suffering functional illiteracy. (That's way below the level of the Koreas, both North and South.)

That's good because we don't want none of them there crazy ideas about thinkin' comin' into our province. Way over half of our ancestors was illiterate, and what's good enough for them is good enough for us. That's why we like newspapers that don't tell us nothin' except which Hollywood stars we never heard of have birthdays today. Them folks who pretend to read and to discuss are just puttin' on airs and causin' trouble.

No. Better not to think. Try the Irving Chapel instead.

And, the exciting Jarmeet Singh has become leader of the NDP.

Big deal.

The NDP began as a party called the CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation). The CCF was founded in 1932 just as the great depression was swallowing Canada. It was a party based on Christian principles of compassion, caring, sharing... at a time when capitalists were using the depression to make themselves richer by forcing low pay and massive unemployment with no help on everybody else. Clergy, like Baptist Tommy Douglas, were prominent in it. And he was the one who set up the party's greatest achievement, medicare.

It had much bigger plans for education and for putting some controls on big business and making the wealthy pay taxes so the rest of us could get at least minimal help to stay alive. But the poor had no money to support the party and to help it win election. And the rich used their money only to help the Liberals and Conservatives. So, about 1970, the CCF reached out for support to the union movement. And it was willing to respond but.....the unions turned out to be much like the corporations they claimed to be fighting. When the CCF became the NDP, the unions insisted it had to look just like the Liberals or Conservatives - only more honest. And so it has.

(For a time, New Brunswick had the ultimate, gutless party - an NDP that wooed the support of the Irvings!)

If we are going to survive, we need change. So far, I see little sign that the NDP is going to change. What they offer us now is a variation of the Liberals and Conservatives, different in that it is honest. But that is not enough. It needs to be a party that responds to human needs, that actually governs for the benefit of all the people. It has to make fundamental changes in a society controlled by its very greedy and brutal 1 percent.

And in New Brunswick, it has to do it with a society of whom half cannot read, and most are too frightened to challenge the powers that keep them that way.
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Despite angry letters I get from mining engineers, Canadian, American and British mining companies have a vicious record all over the world. These are people whose corporate owners urge governments into wars so they can steal resources. Then, having stolen them (as in South Africa, Congo, Guatemala, etc.), they horribly abuse the workers with low pay, long hours, child labour, torture, and mass murder of any who complain.

Of course, none of this ever makes our news. That's why so few New Brunswickers have ever heard of the death of Raoul Leger, murdered in Guatemala as a lay missionary, and now buried just down the road from the Irving Chapel - but probably has not been mentioned at any of the services.

Some years ago, I stood in a room in Amsterdam. In World War 2, a young, Jewish girl, Anne Frank, lived hidden from the world in that room. Then someone betrayed her to the Naziis - and she would die in the horror of one of the Nazi death camps. An FBI agent is now trying to find out who betrayed her hiding place to the Naziis.

It wasn't just Germans who turned Jews over to the camps. All the conquered countries of the time were anti-Jewish (as were Canada and the U.S.), In any case, after conquest most countries flocked to serve the Naziis. They quite happily reported Jews in hiding. Nor have their attitudes changed much to this day.

And here's a hard truth about the Alberta oil industry. It has to go. There is no point in babbling about how it can create jobs. The reality is that unless it does go, we shall all be in deep, deep trouble.

The oil industry, including Irving oil, has refused to recognize that very clear truth. And the only leadership it has provided is to provide none, and to assume it can go on forever. But it's not a matter of discussion, really. The evidence screams at us. Unless we take action and take it soon, oil could well be the death of all of us. We are not in control in this.

This is a story that may have little meaning to New Brunswick readers since the irving press has rarely bothered to even mention that there is a war happening in Yemen. (And pay no attention to those figures on deaths in the Yemen war. Given the intense and lengthy bombing of Yemen, those death figures are simply not believable.

The hundred or more surviving victims of the Las Vega shootings now face a survival problem. Nevada doesn't have any medicaid legislation. Get shot - and you're on you own. And the bills, thanks to the greed of the private businesses who own the hospitals and the doctors. the costs will be very, very high. And well over 500 people were wounded in Las Vegas. And it's a safe bet that many of them have nothing like the money to pay for privatized care.

Ah, yes. The joy of privatized medical care....

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/02/las-vegas-shooting-gofundme-health-care/
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The proportion of wealthy in this world is getting higher - though still a very, very small proportion,and it's happening because the rest of us are being made poorer. No doubt professor deSavoie will produce a book on the subject telling us that this is good for us.

http://www.womensystems.com/2017/09/the-world-now-has-165-million.html
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We all use words, and often, words that we don't understand. Mr. Irving once announced that he had declared himself to be 'in coalition with the provincial government'. Did he know what that meant? I doubt it. If he had known, he would have known that to declare himself unilaterally in coalition was illegal.

Similarly, we commonly use the term anti-semitic without knowing what it means. For a start, Jews are not semites. In fact, they are not a race or nationality of any sort. Hitler invented them as a race. It is surely unwise of us to follow Hitler's lead.

Actually, Jews are generally very much like Christians (or Muslims or Taoists).

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47931.htm

This article makes that point though with, I think, too much emphasis on differences the author perceives. While it's true there are Jews of extreme views, my experience is that they are a minority.
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Recently, Donald Trump has referred to Russia, China, - and Venezuela - as threats to the U.S. I thought that was surely a bit much, and found it hard to imagine Venezuelan military hordes descending on Washington.

Venezuela is certainly a country in trouble partly by the falling price of its oil, and partly by constant U.S. interference in it for over a century. As it has all over South America, the U.S. has destroyed democracies and impoverished populations to provide big profits for American billionaires.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47926.htm
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This next analysis comes from a very well-informed writer.

Commonly, we celebrate war. Even November 11, our remembrance day, romanticizes war. We almost never face the reality of it - unless it's to criticize the brutality of the other side.

On, Nov. 11, we are sure to hear some speaker pick up the lines from Flanders' Fields. "In Flanders' Fields the poppies blow------Take up our quarrel with the foe, To you from failing hands we throw the torch.."

What quarrel with the foe? This was world war 1, remember. Exactly why did we kill, and send young men to be killed? I would be surprised if one Canadian in a thousand could tell why we sent Canadians to die in that war.

The Canadian Legion could be a big help in this. Unfortunately, the people who founded the Commonwealth legions after world war 1 formed them to serve the interests of the wealthy rather than those who served in the war. And much of that influence still lingers.

Nov. 11 should be a day of remembrance, and a day of critical examination of war and what it is commonly about. Too bad we so often make it a day of the glorification of war.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47921.htm
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Gee! Here's story that didn't make the irving press.

http://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/10/01/news/fear-and-money-breeds-silence-saskatchewan
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The following is a look at poverty and starvation over the last couple of centuries. In all cases, the wealthy didn't give a damn. In many cases, they could have eased the suffering - but wouldn't lift a finger. This was true of the Irish potato famine, horrible suffering in Africa, China, South America - all ignored by the wealthy and powerful, though all could have easily been remedied. One of the villains in such a case was Winston Churchill who, as a crashing racist, allowed five million people of Bengal to die of starvation though he could easily have supplied the food.

http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/10/02/great-hunger/

ooh! I know. I could write a book about how the rich are philanthropists who are always helping the poor. Maybe I could even get wealthy people to pay me for it.
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Hitler was a genocidal racist. So was Winston Churchill. So was George Bush. So is Donald Trump. In fact, Hitler was typical of people of many races and nationalities all over the world. So, to stick my neck out, is Netanyahu of Israel.

http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/09/29/hitler-churchill-trump-aung-san-suu-kyi-genocidal-intent-to-destroy/
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Just what we need - another war. And this one is not as simple as it may appear. The Kurds, who want their own state, need the support of Israel to get it. And why would Israel support the Kurds? Because it wants a country that would help to threaten Iran. Sometimes, wars are not a good idea at all.

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About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep